Tag: gtac2016

GTAC2016 finished today. I must say it was one of the best test-oriented conferences I have been to.

Some highlights:

Single track, which eliminated having regrets over the other session being potentially more interesting.

Schedule loose enough to leave ample time for networking, talking to presenters, catching up on work, or just wandering around Google’s beautiful Tech Corners campus.

Mixing long (1-hour) and short (15-minutes lightning talk) sessions that kept audience engaged. The Quirkier Side of Testing on day 1 and Code Coverage on day 2 were perfect after-lunch warm ups to make sure we don’t drift away.

Wide range of topics covered: from formal test analysis and fuzzing, through elaborate test frameworks over to diversity and democratization of development.

Emanuil Slavov: “Need for Speed – Accelerate Automation Tests From 3 Hours to 3 Minutes” – systematic approach to lowering test execution time. It looked easy in Emanuil’s presentation, but one can only imagine the amount of brainpower needed to achieve a 150x test execution time reduction, since in reality they went down from 180 minutes to almost 1-minute execution.

Kostya Serebryany: “Finding bugs in C++ libraries using LibFuzzer” – let the computers find bugs in the code! Also very nice of Google to offer to scan open-source projects.

Jonathan Abrahams: “How I learned to crash test a server” – was a nice presentation of how MongoDB survives system crashes. And a great lesson on interesting issues you can catch when deliberately breaking the system.